Three Times Dead (2 page)

I recall the take-off because the chopper jolted and I screamed while the paramedic adjusted the drip in my arm to deliver more painkillers. I felt queasy and lightheaded and heard the static as the paramedic told the pilot to go easy. It was smoother after that, and I know I blacked out for a while as it seemed within a second of taking off we were landing again.

I braced myself. The comfort that the drugs had created was going to be tested again and I didn’t know if I could take much more of the agony.

The chopper touched down so gently that I didn’t realize it had until the rear door opened and a group of people in white coats stood there, ready to take me. There’s something about the expression of people who have to deal with the worst things and take it all in their stride. This was their job and they were serious about it. I was glad of that.

The gentle chopper landing was all undone as they moved me out. The paramedic had pumped me full of something before we landed as I was aware of the jolts and the knocks and the pain, but it didn’t send me out of my tree like it had before.

The blades of the chopper appeared above me, thrashing the air as they slowed down, the engine now off. I heard the paramedic relaying information to the doctors as they wheeled me towards the entrance. This was all familiar to me. Not often you get two chopper rides to the hospital in as many months.

Inside the corridor, sound was muffled, the lights flashing above me as I was pushed down to the emergency department, then a moment of agony as they moved me from the stretcher to the bed. Mark said he had to go and sort out paperwork so a nurse took his place by my head. She had blue eyes and I smiled. Silly really as I doubt she saw it under the oxygen mask. Strong painkillers can make you do stupid things.

I felt rather than saw the fuss around me. Doctors saying “… losing a lot of blood …” and the nurse soothing me when I cried out as they cut away my shoe, then my trousers, exposing what I knew had to be a bad injury, for the nurse stopped talking and stared down towards the bottom of the bed.

“Is it bad?” I asked, although I knew.

“Not too bad,” she lied. “How’s the pain?”

“Seven,” I said, knowing what was expected. She smiled at me and continued to look at me, I think so that she wouldn’t have to see the injury. She looked too young to be a nurse.

“Surgery consult …” I heard someone say. “Who’s on orthopaedic tonight?”

“Dr Harris is on call.”

“Then get him in here fast. We’ve got to stop the bleeding. How are his stats?”

“Dropping,” replied a different voice from over my right shoulder. “Blood pressure is 60 over 35. Heart rate’s 40.”

“We might need to intubate …”

Just then my heart hiccupped. That’s the only way I can describe it. One second it was beating slowly but normally, then it convulsed, like a hiccup, and intense pain filled my chest. I cried out and then tried to gulp air back into my lungs, which refused to inflate. The equipment around me started making all sorts of alarming noises. Sounds faded, darkness encroached on my eyes, like the shutters of a reflex camera twisting in. Frantically I looked up at the nurse, into her blue eyes, but she wasn’t looking at me.

But the old Maori man behind her was. He looked deep into my eyes, his own dark and serious, the brown irises like mud pools from which there was no reflected light. The oxygen mask was ripped from my face and someone tilted my head back. A shiny metal instrument wavered over my face, momentarily obscuring the old man. The shutters closed in, sounds faded, and the old man’s intense eyes held mine until the blackness twisted in completely.

I struggled up from the pit of nothing. I forced my eyelids open. I was on a bed, in a strange room. I heard beeps and hisses around me but couldn’t identify where they came from or what they were. My body felt heavy. I turned my head towards a dim source of light – a window. The dark blue of the sky was tinged with a slight pink, and the hazy light was enough to for me to make out the figure of a man silhouetted against the window. The figure moved towards me and I recognized the old Maori man I’d seen before. Then I’d only seen his face, but now I saw the whole of him. He was barefoot, holding the greenstone mere across his chest, resting it against his feathered cloak. He looked directly at me.

“Am I dead?” I asked him.

“No,” he said.

“Who are you?”

“My name is Piripi. I am your grandfather.”

That’s when I knew I was dreaming, because no way was this man my grandfather.

“You do not believe me but you will come to believe,” he said. “Your tupuna will show you the truth.”

“I’m dreaming,” I said.

“As you wish,” the old man said and disappeared from view, leaving me looking at the pinky glow outside the window.

I closed my eyes and sank back into blackness.

Dragging myself towards the light, I first became aware of voices; familiar voices speaking in a way that I had come to know. I raised heavy eyelids. It was daylight. Mark was on my left and Tim and James were on my right. They were bent over clasped hands, praying.

“I’m alive,” I said – at least I thought I was. My voice was faint and hoarse.

They looked up and Mark smiled, although his face was drawn. He seemed to have aged ten years.

“Yes, alive but it was close,” Mark said and looked at the other two guys. “Tim, James, let Bevan’s mum know that he’s awake and making sense.”

“Making sense?”

“You’ve been talking a lot of rubbish for days – the doctor said it was the drugs.”

That explained my vision of the old man. I licked my lips. They were dry, as was my mouth and throat. It hurt to talk.

“Do you want some water?” Mark asked.

I nodded.

He leant over and picked up a beaker of water from which a plastic straw protruded. He placed it on my lips and I took in a mouthful. It felt cool as it slid down my parched throat. Then he took it away.

“The doctor said you shouldn’t have too much to start off with.”

“Where am I?”

“Waikato Hospital. This is the HDU – high dependency unit. You were in intensive care for a while but they moved you in here when they took out the breathing tube.”

“How long have I been here?”

“In here? They moved you in here yesterday but you were three days in intensive care. You were in pretty bad shape.”

“Am I ok now?”

Mark hesitated and looked away. Mum came into my range of vision and I saw she wanted to hug me, but when I looked down at myself, all I saw were tubes and wires. I guessed she was afraid of touching me. She came to the other side of the bed and took my hand. She sucked in her bottom lip like she always does when she’s upset and looked across at Mark. The nod of her head was almost imperceptible.

“Right, Bevan.” I switched my attention back to Mark. “Your mother asked that I be the one to tell you this. She felt she couldn’t and, as I was there …” His voice faltered. What was he going to say? That I had died? I knew that. But now I lived. Again I’d been snatched back from the jaws of death.

Mark cleared his throat and began what seemed to be a rehearsed speech.

“When the van hit the barrier, the front of it caved it and the left side, where you were sitting, took most of the impact. The front side of the van wrapped itself around your left foot.” I nodded. I remembered being trapped. “Well, they got you out and flew you here but you’d lost a lot of blood and you crashed in ED. They resuscitated you and got you into theatre where they stopped the bleeding and had a better look at your leg.” He stopped and took a deep breath. “The bottom of your leg from the ankle down was crushed beyond repair. There was nothing they could do to save it. I’m sorry, Bevan, but they amputated your left leg below the knee.”

I stared at him, waiting for him to tell me that they had put it back on again, but he didn’t say anything. Tearing my eyes away from his, I looked down the length of the bed. There was my right foot, making a tent of the sheet. Where the left foot should have been was nothing, the sheet dropped away at about mid calf.

I looked over at my mother. The tears were running down her face.

“It was just an accident,” I said. I wasn’t sure why I said that.

With that she howled and ran from the room.

I looked over at Mark and said, “It’s not true, is it? You’re just joking with me, eh?”

“I’m sorry, Bevan, I’m telling you the truth.”

I closed my eyes and let the darkness take me away. It was better than trying to deal with the news that Mark had just delivered.

Haki held the patu tight in one hand and the musket in the other as he crept along the ridge, his eyes on the blue-coated soldiers just a short distance away. Behind him the warriors were holding out in the pa but it was only a matter of time before they were overrun. Desperate, he turned and ran.

The bullets whipped through the air around him, one gouging the skin of his arm but he ignored it as he leapt into the pa, where he was protected by the embankment but trapped at the same time. The warriors were reloading their muskets as fast as they could but still they could not shoot as quickly as the soldiers.

“Te Huirama is dead,” he heard a man say.

“We must flee,” another replied. “Across Whangamerino.”

Haki looked down the slope to the stream running in the valley below. Many would be dead before they reached the bottom. He quickly reloaded his musket.

“Together!” he cried before climbing out of the pit and running down the slope, closely followed by the rest of the men. With a roar, the soldiers rose up and followed them, shooting wildly, some of their bullets going wide, but some hitting the warriors as they ran.

A soldier on horseback was leading the charge. Haki turned, aimed and fired. He missed. The man raised his sword as he charged forward and Haki raised his arm to ward off the blow, screaming in defiance as the blade flashed down. Haki stepped back, his foot sinking deep into the soft ground of the marsh and he lost his balance. Arms flailing, he fell as the blade slashed the side of his face, pain exploding through his skull, but he was alive when he hit the ground. The landing was soft but the horse, unnerved, reared above him, hooves thumping heavily around him as he rolled away, avoiding their devastating impact. The man on the horse shouted as he struggled to control the animal. Haki raised himself into a crouch and looked towards the river. He could make it.

He picked up the musket he had dropped as he fell and, still in a crouch, splashed between the clumps of grass that grew around the muddy pathways of the swamp. The horseman behind him now had the horse under control and would soon be after him.

He did not look back but focused on the ground ahead of him, treacherous because of the mud and deep pools that lay in wait. There were canoes in the river and men swimming out to them. If he could make it there, he would be able to get away.

The thump of the horse’s hooves grew louder behind him. The man was shouting. Haki saw the clear water beyond the marsh.

He ducked as he felt the horse come up behind him, swerving away at the last minute and the horseman missed his mark. In the river, the men in the canoes saw Haki and shouted encouragement.

Ignoring the pain and the warm blood that ran down the side of his face, he surged forward, splashing through the shallow water at the river’s edge and striking out for the nearest canoe, his musket still in one hand, the patu in the other, hardly feeling the icy cold of the water.

Hands grabbed him as he reached the side of the canoe, and they pulled him in.

“Well done, brother,” Matiu said as Haki fell into the bottom of the canoe. Haki raised himself as the men dipped their paddles into the water to pull the canoe downstream, and looked back at the horseman now halted on the bank.

“Pakeha scum!” he shouted at him.

The man turned his horse around and rode away.

I opened my eyes, expecting to see blue skies and green water and feel the wood of the canoe underneath me, but instead I saw white walls and a green curtain and felt a soft bed beneath me. Memories of the dream faded. A rustle of papers made me look to the right. Mum sat there, a folder on her lap and a pen in her hand. She looked over at me and smiled. “Nice to have you back, son. You had us worried for a while.”

“What day is it?”

“Saturday. It’s been five days now since the accident.”

I frowned, trying to remember. I put my hand up to my ear but it felt whole. As the memory of the dream faded, I remembered Mark sitting by my bed telling me that they’d taken off my leg. I looked down the bed and saw the sheet lie flat where my left foot should have been. I felt sick.

“Are you all right?” Mum asked.

“I’m going to throw up.”

I saw the panic in her eyes as she threw down the papers that were on her lap. She snatched up a plastic container and held it as I tried to vomit, but nothing but green bile came up. A nurse came in and took the container from Mum.

“It’s the drugs,” she said. “They can make you nauseous. I’ll ask the doctor if I can give you something for it. Have a sip of water.”

She held the straw to my mouth and I drank a mouthful. It washed the vile taste from my mouth but didn’t make me feel any less nauseous. She took the container away and returned a few moments later with another, this time with a syringe in it.

She fiddled with the tubes that led into my arm, and then instead of injecting the syringe into my skin, she injected it into a plastic valve kind of the thing in the line.

“That should make you feel better.” I wasn’t sure about that but I took her word for it. “Although it can make you feel sleepy.” She left.

“Where’s Mark?” I asked Mum.

“He’s gone back to Auckland. He’s got to be in church tomorrow, he said. And he took those two mates of yours with him, the ones that were in the accident. You’ve had a few visitors since you’ve been here but I’m not sure that you remember. They’ve kept you sedated most of the time.”

I remembered what Mark had told me, not knowing if it was true. “They took off my leg?”

Mum looked down at the papers on her lap. When she looked up, there were tears in her eyes.

“It was too badly damaged and the best thing was to take it off.”

“They didn’t ask me what I thought of that! Did they ask you before they chopped it off?”

“It was the only thing that could be done. We were driving down at the time. Mark was on the phone to us because they needed someone to sign the consent forms right there and then and he was the only one available. After talking to the doctor, we realized that there was nothing that could be done but to take it off to save your life. We told him it was ok to go ahead. It broke my heart.”

“So that’s it then – I’m a cripple!”

“They tell me that you can have a prosthetic leg, and that you’ll walk like a normal person.”

“But I won’t be a normal person – I’ll be person with half a leg.”

“Better than being dead.”

“I’d rather be dead!” I yelled at her.

“I can understand that you’re angry, Bevan, you’ve suffered a loss and you have a grief process to go through. This is the angry phase.”

“I have a right to be angry.”

“Maybe you do, but you don’t have to take it out on everyone else. We’ve all got to come to terms with this.”

“This is my pain, my loss, not yours. I’ve got to come to terms with it.”

Mum looked sad. “Believe me, Bevan, it is as much my loss as yours. I gave birth to a whole baby, one with all its fingers and toes and now part of that perfect child has been lost. I grieve as well. But together we’ll make it through this.”

“Don’t use your psycho babble on me, Mum, I’m not one of your patients.”

“No, you’re my son and I love you. I’ll be here for you every step of the way.”

“Don’t give me that sentimental crap,” I said.

“It’ll be all right, Bevan, you’ll see.”

“No it won’t. Go away! Leave me alone!”

Mum seemed about to say something but instead gathered all her papers and, with tears in her eyes, left the room. I almost opened my mouth to call her back in, suddenly sorry for what I had said, but I didn’t know what to say, and I didn’t have the energy to say it.

I closed my eyes to blot out the sight of my truncated foot.